Website usability best practices: improve the user experience of your website
Recognizable? You've invested a lot of time in creating your website, but the visitors stay away. The cause could be the usability of your website. How user-friendly is your website and can people find their way around? In this blog, we discuss the best practices to optimize the usability of your website so that visitors stay longer and come back more often.
Keep it Simple
Having a simple website is crucial if you want the user experience to be good. Avoid elements on your site that are unnecessary and make sure your website looks uncluttered. If you were to put yourself in your target audience's shoes, is it easy to understand how your website works and where to find what you're looking for? This seems like a pretty simple principle, but even big companies make mistakes here.
Things you can consider include your fonts and use of color. In addition, make sure there is a logical arrangement of content on your website.
Speed optimization
Another important issue in terms of Web site usability is the speed of your Web site. A slow website can quickly become an annoyance for many people, as people are increasingly accustomed to websites loading quickly. A faster website also affects your search engine ranking. In fact, Google places a lot of value on the speed of websites, so optimizing for this is essential. Furthermore, having a slow website also affects conversion. A slow website will not convert as well.
What can you do if you have a slow Web site? Use a tool such as Pagespeed Insights or Gtmetrix to test the speed of your website. In addition, make sure that images are compressed, that your website is technically sound and that you are affiliated with a fast hosting provider.
Navigation
Good navigation helps users find what they are looking for quickly. A user-friendly website has an intuitive and clear navigation structure. Make sure your menu is logically structured and use breadcrumbs to help users find their way back to previous pages. In addition, make sure this fits well with your URL structure.
A good navigation structure includes main menus, sub-menus and a clear footer with important links. This not only helps usability, but also SEO, as a clear structure helps search engines index your website better.
A responsive design
Responsive design ensures that your website works well on any device, whether it's a computer, tablet or smartphone. This not only improves usability, but is also important for SEO. More than half of Internet traffic today comes from mobile devices, so having a mobile-friendly website is a must. Always test carefully if your website is optimized for different screen sizes.
In addition, it is also important in terms of usability to create elements on your site that are also often found on other websites. Think of buttons and forms that are recognizable to users, but also buttons such as a "hamburger" menu icon, or recognizable phone icon on the contact page.
Accessible to All
Make sure your Web site is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This increases your audience and improves the user experience. Accessibility for all is not only an ethical good thing to do, it can also affect the performance of your Web site. Filling in titles and alt tags is one example. It helps people with poor eyesight understand photos and also has benefits for SEO and voice search.
Thus, an accessible website can be used by a wider audience, including people with visual, hearing or motor impairments.
Security
A secure website is important not only for data protection, but also for user trust. Security measures such as HTTPS and performing regular updates on your website are essential. In addition, make sure you use a good password to log in which cannot be easily cracked.
Search functionality
Good search functionality helps users quickly find the information or products they need. This is especially important for larger websites with a lot of content or extensive offerings.
Some tips we would like to include in this is that you put search bar in a clear place on the website, make sure there is an error tolerance in terms of typos in searches and that one can apply filters to further specify their search result.
Make it as relevant to the visitor as possible
Changes are happening fast in the marketing world. Not only because of AI but also with algorithm updates from Google. It is becoming increasingly important that your website and content is a good match for the searcher's query. So make sure this is what you focus on. Know who your target audience is and how they prefer to be provided with information.
Use Good Content
What you often hear is "content is king," and it really is. If the content on your website is not good, the speed or design can be as good as it is, but visitors will quickly click away or scroll through. So make sure you have high-quality and relevant content that meets the needs of your target audience and that you have a good content strategy.
Tracking
The last point we want to discuss in terms of Web site usability is tracking user behavior on your Web site helps you understand what works and what doesn't. This allows you to make continuous improvements. Tracking is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your website and making data-driven decisions.
Tracking gives you insight into how users interact with your website, which pages are popular and where improvement is needed. This helps optimize the user experience and increase conversion rates.
Many companies invest a lot of money in creating a functional website and marketing it, but don't actually know how the site is performing and where they need to take direction. Our Digital Reputation Monitor gives you deep insight into your website's performance and helps you make data-driven decisions that take your digital strategy to the next level.
If you would like help or advice on the issues discussed, please contact us.
